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Open Site Explorer not showing back links

I recently purchased several high DA directory listings such as Yahoo, Business.com, Best of the Web and a couple of others. I have been anxiously awaiting the Open Site Explorer update, anticipating my client's site DA would jump. After the last update, it is only showing ONE of the 5 directory listing links - which means it is not an accurate report.

I have verified that the listings DO exist and it has been over a month since the listings were published - with the last site explorer index update being 4/22/13.

Does anyone know a realistic time frame that I can expect to start seeing juice from these back links?

6 Responses

You purchased those links? If you did, don't expect juice from those. If the Website selling those listings is an authority they are most likely nofollowing the links, therefore it has no ranking benefits but are built for users.

the whole point of purchasing the links is to get it followed. nofollow links generally come free. Yahoo and Business directories both will definitely have followed links, that much I know for sure.

Here's the thing sin - OSE isn't perfect. The fine folk at SEOmoz will be the first to tell you so. Some people estimate they see 25% of links out there but I think that number is much higher. And the authority of the referring domain has nothing to do with it. I have links coming from microsoft that have yet to register on OSE just-discovered or otherwise. Just the way it is. The internet is too rapidly changing to be on top of all of this. Which is why it is good, as Streamline said, to consider multiple tracking solutions. Either way you need to take this data as a "sampling" or "snapshot" and not as a be-all for your link juice.

The real evidence is in your SERPs. Those should improve fairly quickly (a week or two) if you really are building quality links. I will say that while the links you purchased probably won't hurt you, I doubt they'll bump your PR or DA up very high. Google doesn't put a TON of emphasis on those directory links. They're not terrible to have, but I wouldn't put all my ducks in that basket. Keep building content and I'm certain you'll see the fruits of your labor soon enough.

It certainly takes time for OSE to crawl the entire web and update its index. As long as the listings do exist, they will eventually show up in OSE. Just keep an eye on the "Just Discovered" tab in OSE, they should show up soon (might be days or weeks or even a month or so).

Business.com is a paid directory listing that is a FOLLOW link. As are the others that i submitted to, to my knowledge. It depends on what you read. I have read dozens of comments from people that said the yahoo directory DID help their site. My client's competitors are employing black hat backlinking methods and I just want to get them the best quality back links possible. They are way behind their competitors and just starting out so I believe these backlinks will help tremendously.

Well keep us posted. I wouldn't call what you've done here a "blackhat" technique, but I'd warn you from fighting fire with fire if you decide to do so. There's a looming penguin update on the horizon and there's a good chance your competitors will disappear when that hits.

Like I said though, keep us posted as we are all just making our best guesses and the more data we have the better.

P.S. It's very easy to find if the link is followed or not. Just go to the location of the link, view source, hit CTRL+F, type in "www.mydomain.com," locate the link, look for rel=nofollow. That's it!

No, I would never take that route and I am PRAYING the update knocks their competitors back where they belong. It is extremely frustrating. I am pretty much starting with a clean slate and doing it right from the start so - hopefully it pays off.

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